Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Obligatory New Parent Freak-Out

Since about last Tuesday, Corrina has developed a little cough, the phlegmy kind that's usually a precursor to a cold. It turned out that on Wednesday we had a normally scheduled doctor appointment for her, and the doctor said that she probably caught something. Sure enough, by Thursday and Friday she had developed a runny nose, more coughing, lots of sneezing, etc.. This wasn't great for her, but she was still in remarkably good spirits. That is, until last night.

Corrina will normally go to bed pretty late since she is still on a eat-every-four-hours schedule, so by the time we were trying to get her to go to sleep, it was around 10pm. Normally, she'll cry a little bit if she's really tired, but last night she cried for well over an hour straight. The tipping point was when at one point she cried so hard that she momentarily couldn't get air, then threw up, and went back to crying. That definitely freaked me out, so we paged the doctor. Apparently one of his associates was on call, who pretty much told us to just observe her, since by then she had stopped crying, and was drifting off to sleep.

But, after 15-20 minutes, she woke up again, crying as hard as before. At this point we decided that a trip to the hospital was probably the way to go. We discussed that there's a 98% chance that they'll just say she has a cold, and that's how they act, but I knew I wasn't comfortable with that other 2%. There's a Children's Hospital in DC, so we decided to take her there. We got though triage and taking of her vitals within the first 30 minutes or so, but after that was a lot of waiting. It was nearly 4 hours before we saw the resident. In this time, a seemingly inordinate amount of nurses stopped when they saw her to say how cute of a kid she is.

The doctor took a look at her and said that her lungs were clear, ears and throat were fine, she wasn't dehydrated, no fever, and there was no rashes or other swollen glands. The only cause for concern was that she was refusing to take anything beside a little water and hadn't had a wet diaper since early that evening (it was around 4am at this point). She figured that the virus she had picked up was causing her throat to hurt so she wasn't comfortable eating anything. They gave her some tylenol to help the throat pain, and had us try feeding her some pedialyte a half hour later. She still wouldn't eat, but she drank a lot of water and finally went.

After that they pretty much said we could go home, and just observe her. So, a predicted result, but I am sure it's a trial that most parents go through when their first kid gets their first cold. Corrina seems to be feeling better today so far, sleeping a lot (since she was up a good portion of the night), crying a little more than usual since I think her throat still hurts, but she took some rice cereal, so that is a good sign. Hopefully this cold will pass soon and she can be back to feeling better and back to her normal routines.